When the economist Michael Piore (1996, p. 742) looked out over the field of economic sociology he saw “an enormous hodge-podge of ideas and insights, existing at all sorts of different levels of abstraction, possibly in contradiction with one another, possibly just incommensurate, without a...

The story of EU rail and transportation policy is about the inter-relation between economic and political integration. The European Union is often seen as a structure for enforcing discipline on governments in a free market. The idealized market is driven by transcendental economic laws of...

Why do firms do what they do? Why does one cut prices while its neighbor buys out competitors? Why does one diversify into new industries while its neighbor spins off subsidiaries to focus on its core competence? Why do some strategies rise while others fall? These are central concerns of both...

Institutions impose constraints on us all. In recent years the institution of the university press has constrained the publication of edited volumes, and the appearance of this particular volume might be seen as evidence against the notion that institutional constraints are real. But this is the...

Thirty years ago, new institutional theory challenged the then dominant functionalist explanations of organizational behavior by pointing to the role of meaning in the production and reproduction of organizational practices (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Meyer & Scott, 1983). But new institutional theory was...

Between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s, American employers adopted sexual harassment grievance procedures and anti-harassment training in droves even though legislation did not require these programs and the courts had not unequivocally vetted them. Where did these strategies come from and how...

Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists trace policy norms to expert epistemic communities and international organizations, who define economic...

What is colloquially known as the "post-socialist transition" comes at an opportune time for economic sociologists, for we are in the midst of developing sociological ways of thinking about economic practices and structures. We had long ceded economic institutions to economists, satisfying...

The Great Depression called Western nations' most fundamental ideas about economic growth into question by disrupting the march of progress. Governments responded by rejecting orthodox growth strategies in favor of new policies they hoped would turn their economies around.' In the realm of...

Agency theorists diagnosed the economic malaise of the 1970s as the result of executive obsession with corporate stability over profitability. Management swallowed many of the pills agency theorists prescribed to increase entrepreneurialism and risk-taking; stock options, dediversification, debt...